Highlights from the Archives

Ever since the craggy-faced former minister took to -- and dominated -- the lecture circuit in the 1830's, Emerson's readers have been trying to grasp him. Is he the granddaddy of American laissez-faire capitalism, his doctrine of unfettered individualism a kind of spiritual vacuum cleaner sucking everything -- other people, nature, society -- into its self-inflated bag? Or maybe Emerson is the public intellectual who spawned the progressive pragmatism of William James and John Dewey on the philosophical side, the poetics of Whitman and Gertrude Stein on the literary. Is he a social reformer? A lonely prophet writing obscurantist prose? A proto-Nietzschean sponsor of the superman? Or just a cold New England fish?

The 200th anniversary of Emerson's birth is this month, and he starts his third century widely regarded as one of America's most influential thinkers. Emerson was part of the same mid-19th-century literary renaissance that produced Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau. He is known, college English students will recall, for his quotable essays (''a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds''), philosophy-minded poems, and role in founding Transcendentalism.

Two giants of American literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain, will be inducted into the Poets' Corner in the arts bay of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street, in a ceremony on Oct. 18. Two deceased writers are selected for the honor annually.

In its time, Brook Farm was one of America's earliest communes, a place for plain living and intellectual stimulation in the countryside outside Boston. Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured there. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived on the farm briefly and later wrote a novel about it.

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